[Novalug] bash commands

[Richard Rognlie]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 03:28:03PM -0500, dtidrow at patriot.net wrote:
> > Some systems have rgrep, but in the absense of that...
> >
> > cd WHEREVER
> >
> > then either
> >         find . -name \*.f -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'string' /dev/null
> >
> Generally I do it this way:
>     find . -name \*.f -exec grep 'string' {} \;
> 
> The above comand runs grep on every file found - the '{}' supplies the
> filename to grep, and the '\;' tells -exec where the command ends

Two minor complaints about that invocation...

1.  grep would always be invoked with 1 filename.  And therefore never show
you which file actually matched.  Just the matching lines themselves.

        find . -name \*.f -exec grep 'string' /dev/null {} \;

fixes that.

2.  grep is invoked once for each file that matches the pattern.
using xargs limits the number of invocations by calling grep with a
bunch of files each time.   minor overhead gain.

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